Tag: seriously not

“Our working agreements had become a little cumbersome,” remarked Joseph, the PO for the Crain, Schmidt, and Poole account. “In fact, they were so bad we considered just adopting the Microsoft Windows End User License as an abbreviated version of our working agreements.”

“It was pretty ridiculous,” added Sonya, a software developer on the project. “Our first retrospective took eleven weeks to complete, mostly due to the delays caused by everyone’s lawyers working out the language around things that needed improvement. We all seemed pretty OK with taking responsibility for our own work but were adamant that someone else should be held accountable for the problems we were facing.”

“In the end we all agreed that Chester, the testing goat, should be the one held accountable. Dual use: testing goat and scapegoat. Seemed pretty efficient to us,” said Denny, the team’s tQA expert.

“And that’s where it all started. Our drive for greater efficiencies, I mean,” said Bernie, a second developer on the project. “Rather quickly, we were collapsing all sorts of two’s and three’s into one. Before long, our 342 page working agreements document was down to three sentences. The PO was thrilled to drop the attorneys from the project budget.”

“Yeah,” added Denny. “Even Chester is back to being just a plain ol’ testing goat again.”

Stand-ups

“Nobody says anything in stand-ups. Zip. Zero. Nada. Nothing.” proclaimed Kurt, scrum master for the Cleo Parker Robinson account. “It’s a room full of clinically certifiable introverts,” declared Seth, the project’s product owner. “They make Marcel Marceau seem annoyingly chatty by comparison,” he added. “Turns out, that was just us being blinded by our own biases and assumptions. One day, Tracy, one of the senior developers on the project all of the sudden slapped both her palms on the conference table, grabbed the polycomm, and started swinging it like a pendulum. Then Raj jumped up, put one hand over his left ear and stretched his right arm out straight. Then Truman made a noise that sounded something like ‘Ahhhhyooooye!’ and started pantomiming like he’s dealing cards. After that, all manner of odd behavior unfolded before our eyes.”

“By the end of the day,” Kurt added, “the number of cards for the sprint in the ‘Done’ column went from 20% to just over 80% – and there’s four days left in the sprint!”

“That’s when it struck us,” interrupted Seth. “The agile delivery team had been paying VERY close attention during the subject matter expert’s all day intensive discovery sessions from the design study. They were communicating their stand-ups through interpretative dance! From then on, it was easy. We just had to work to stay out of their way.”

Sprint Reviews

“We’d just kicked off the project with the Gucci account and muddled through our first working session, but it just didn’t feel productive,” said Carmine, a UI/UX expert. “Something was preventing us for actually getting to work. It was like we were pretending or something,” she added.

“So we hit on the idea we weren’t dressed for the part. We brainstormed a zillion outfit options and ran through an affinity exercise on the results before deciding on the optimal wardrobe,” chimed in Zeke, a tQA specialist.

“I have to admit, though,” shared Carmine. “It was a pretty awkward moment at the start of our first review with the client. There we were, sitting across the table from what must have been a million bucks worth of gabardine and silk and us in our flannel shirts, bib overalls, and work boots. Luckily, our PO is brilliant. She reached out, put her hand on the CLO’s shoulder and said, ‘Don’t worry. They’re Carharts!’ Huge sighs of relief filled the conference room knowing only quality name brands were present. We rolled up our sleeves and they loosened their ties and shirt collars and we stepped through a fantastic demonstration.”

The Future of Scrum

“Form a hypothesis, design an experiment, and then analyze the results. That’s really all we do,” said Guy Torqué, Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Advance Agile Research in Marseille, France. “We don’t always get it right. For example, we hypothesized that if standing up during meetings prompted participants to move through meetings more efficiently then perhaps if we had them stand on their heads the efficiency would increase even more. What we discovered is that people just passed out and meeting recovery time increased substantially. Similar results happened with our tests using advanced yoga poses.”

But that didn’t stop the intrepid researchers from pressing forward. They also experimented with having participants lighting and holding onto a match when it was their turn to speak during stand-ups. This did increase the speed at which individuals moved through the classic three questions for stand-ups, but unfortunately it also decreased productivity as agile delivery team members were less motivated to develop work products with burned fingers.

“Agile team role development is another area of acute research interest,” said Guy. “We’re currently testing a ‘Product Owner of Fortune’ hypothesis. Several weeks ago we dropped a dozen highly trained product owners deep into the interior of several politically unstable countries with a satchel full of sticky notes and marker pens. Our hypothesis is that they should be able to successfully define a set of minimum viable procedures that will successfully lead them out of the troubled areas. We haven’t heard back from any of them as yet. But it’s early,” he said, optimistically.